Rowan piercing founder quit Wall Street job to start business—now it brings in $70 million a year

Louisa Serene Schneider has never been short on business ideas.

She once started a yoga-wear company (“long before Lululemon existed,” she says) and at another point tried to launch a language tutoring business. Neither of them stuck, but ideas kept coming.

Then, in 2017, Schneider came up with an idea that she felt had momentum. She quit her high-profile job on Wall Street with what she calls a “competitive C-level salary” to bet on herself and start an ear-piercing business.

“It was the first time in my life that I hadn’t had a full-time job,” Schneider, now 48, tells CNBC Make It. “I was actually terrified, and I was working out of my attic.”

Seven years later the business, now known as Rowan, is the only ear-piercing business with its own medical board and where registered nurses are trained to pierce ears. Rowan has 90 studios across the U.S. and roughly 800 employees, over half of whom are nurses.

Schneider’s journey to becoming founder and CEO of Rowan hasn’t been easy. “There were many days when I wanted to give up, and days when I would look at the bank account and think, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make payroll,'” she says. “I would just have to keep going.”

Here’s how she built Rowan into a profitable business that brought in over $70 million in revenue last year.

Like many company origin stories, the idea for Rowan came from Schneider’s own needs.

At the time, she was looking for places to get her daughter’s ears pierced. She’d had her own bad piercing experiences and wasn’t loving the options to take her daughter to a mall or jewelry store.

“Our pediatrician didn’t pierce ears, and I did not want to take her to any of the existing ear-piercing options,” Schneider says.

Her work as a hedge fund manager involved assessing ailing malls, and she saw a gap in the market for ear-piercing services that provided “safety and the medical aspect of piercing, and combining that with a celebratory and intentional service.”

Pus, “my parents are both doctors, and I knew that for our family, ear piercing was a medical procedure and I really wanted it to be done safely,” she says. “And that is where the idea for Rowan was born.”

In 2017, Schneider got to work from her attic in Larchmont, New York.

She didn’t have the money to build out an actual store, so she started with an at-home concierge-style piercing service where people could call and email to have a nurse come to them for a piercing appointment. Schneider says the company built its original network of piercers thanks to a friend who teaches nursing at Columbia University.

The company also sold monthly subscription boxes of hypoallergenic earrings for $20 per pair — the idea being that piercing customers would then buy into a subscription model for new jewelry every month.

Schneider says she and her friend Sarah Fraser, a finance executive who is no longer with the business, bootstrapped initial operations with their own savings.

“It was an experience for me that was unlike any I had had before, where people audibly sighed or questioned me when I told them what I was doing,” she says. “A lot of people looked at me as if I was crazy, and they didn’t see ear piercing or earrings or jewelry as a real business.”

But Schneider saw the potential of her market: Provide someone a good piercing experience once, and they and their family could be lifelong customers.

In December 2018, Schneider paid digital creator Beth Chappo to promote her subscription jewelry line in time for the holidays.

Within minutes of the post going live, Schneider says the company started selling “hundreds and hundreds” of subscription boxes.

It was way more than they expected, and she was worried about completing the gift orders in time. “We didn’t have the ability to fulfill those orders,” she says, “so I called the only people that I could at the time, my parents, who drove six hours and spent the next 48 hours working with me in my attic, putting the boxes together.”

After the influencer’s viral post, Schneider started a formal round of seed funding. While Rowan was seeing positive feedback from customers, getting investors onboard was a different story.

“Fundraising is awful,” Schneider says. “People tell you that you’re an idiot over and over and over again, and then you have to pick yourself up and say, ‘OK, am I? No, I know this is right. I know I can do this.'”

During one particularly low moment, Schneider says she was presented an opportunity to take investor meetings while on a family trip to California, only to be told “no” repeatedly: “Not only was I missing my family vacation, but I was being told that the business idea wasn’t big enough for them.”

It’s not lost on her that investors, mostly men, didn’t see the potential in her business that caters primarily to women. “Male investors are typically the allocators of capital, and because they don’t typically get their ears pierced, I felt that there was an obvious gap in this market” they weren’t investing in, Schneider says. Other ear-piercing companies have been around for decades, she notes, but “the experience has not changed or evolved to modern day.”

Keep the momentum going long enough, though, and “eventually you meet somebody that believes in you,” she says.

The company raised $5 million in seed capital between 2018 to 2021. It went on to raise a series A in the spring of 2021, and by that fall, raised $20 million in series B funding.

“Since that time, we have not raised any money because our business, fortunately and with a lot of hard work, has been very profitable,” Schneider says. The company became profitable in 2023, she says.

In 2019, Target reached out to Rowan for a partnership, which resulted in over 300 piercing pop-up locations in the retailer’s stores across the country.

In 2020, when the world shut down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Rowan continued to operate by sending nurses to people’s homes to get their ears pierced.

“Families did not have to forego this milestone during what was otherwise a really sad time for a lot of people,” Schneider says.

The company finally opened its first brick and mortar store where people can get their ears pierced and buy earrings in New York City later that year, ending the at-home piercing service and subscription boxes.

Rowan continued to open new brick-and-mortar locations. By 2022, Schneider decided to end their Target partnership because their own studios were becoming more profitable, and they could provide a better experience to customers and nurses in their own spaces.

Rowan currently employs over 550 nurses, and the company’s medical team created its own curriculum to train nurses in ear piercing techniques.

Schneider says it’s important to her that Rowan provides a good opportunity for nurses, who often work three 12-hour or four 10-hour shifts per week at a hospital, but may want to pick up additional work on their off days.

Nurses are paid around $23 to $30 per hour, plus tips, depending on the Rowan studio location, according to the company’s recent job listings.

Daniela, a nurse at a NYC hospital, works part-time at Rowan two days a week. “I love it here because of the creative side of nursing,” she says. “We’re able to work with our customers, pierce their ears, get them excited, whereas at the hospital it’s more of a stressful job.”

Rowan is on track to provide those opportunities to more nurses and customers: The company will hit 100 studios by the end of 2025 and is projected to bring in $150 million in revenue, Schneider says.

“Every time I see a piercing and the smile afterwards and the clapping and the joy of the family,” she says, “that’s when I know we’re successful. It really is about the joy that we’re bringing.”

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